While thinking up names, Unix/open source people tend to come up with
names containing ‘X’. I can almost hear them scream “‘X’, the new and
free(as in beer, pizza and speech) ‘i’(as in iPhone, iPod, etc.)!”

My (possibly fictive) story goes like this: Some time ago, 3 separate
development teams came together to find a name for their product.

The first team was making a secure, social, easy
way of authenticating browsers. Since they where developing an open
authentication protocol, and read loads of developer guidelines, they
came up with XAuth, using proper CamelCasing, as one was supposed to.

The second team had a nice OAuth
implementation running, but some people required using good ol'
passwords, so they came up with the idea of requesting tokens using
regular credentials, instead of complicated token exchanges. Since they
wanted to be hip, and had a nice marketing department, they came up with
xAuth, in line with the iDevice casing.

The third
team
thought it would be nice to apply the security of OAuth to email. Since
this was way to cool to be called OAuth-for-email, they decided to add
the cool ‘X’ in front of it. And as we all know(don’t we?), mail servers
talk to each other in ALL CAPS, so it was a logical thing to call their
system XOAUTH(although they’re not all that consistent about it).